Over the past decade or so, donors have increasingly sought to link their financing to results on the ground, and focus on interventions towards the poor. In sanitation, this effort has mostly taken the form of pilot operations through government agencies; only a handful of schemes have involved international non-governmental organisations (INGOs). This discussion paper shows how the INGO East Meets West (EMW) pioneered the use of output-based aid (OBA) type incentives to ensure sustainability and better poverty targeting in Vietnam.